Looking for tardigrades setup

I didn’t get a chance to go in to lab this weekend so I couldn’t get my notes, so I’m doing it now. I posted all my results from looking under the scope on Friday evening here. Side note: I looked at the sample again today and everything was still busting with life. No tardigrades, but I got some cool videos which I’m posting to BenchFly (I’ll post in my notebook when they’re up).

I would use a pair of tweezers to grab a chunk of lichen from the original sample and place it in an analyslide. With the tweezers I would shake the lichen sample for about 1 minute. This would break the lichen into much smaller chunks which should release the water bears from their shelter/slumber.

lichen in analyslide suspended in di water.

In the lab we have an Olympus IX71 inverted microscope and I used a 20x objective to visualize the samples.

I ended up checking 2 of the 3 samples I prepared, and saw nothing but lichen chunks in there. Eventually I looked at the original petri dish sample and got all the cool results that I mentioned earlier.